John Hunter (1728-1793) and his legacy to science.

Abstract

John Hunter was born in 1728 in Kilbride East, Lanarkshire, Scotland, as the youngest child of a family of ten children. John’s father died in 1741 and he was thus left to care for his mother. When John was about 17, young John moved to London to study under William Hunter (1718–1783), his 10-yearelder brother and was already an anatomist and obstetrician [24]. He studied as a dissector in William’s Anatomy School in Covent Garden in 1748 and showed his abilities on cadaver dissections. In 1749, he became a lecturer and demonstrator in anatomy [11]. His brother obtained permission for him to attend the Chelsea Hospital under the supervision of Dr. William Cheselden (1688–1752), Hunter’s first master in surgery and the most celebrated surgeon of his time. On the retirement of Dr. William Cheselden from Chelsea Hospital, Hunter entered as surgeon’s pupil at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and became a pupil of Percivall Pott (1714–1788) [17]. During his studies under the aforementioned scientists, John made a great progress on dissection. In 1753, as an award of his progress and an honor bestowed upon his mentor Percivall Pott, Hunter was elected Master of Anatomy at Surgeon’s Hall [3]. During the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) with France, Hunter was commissioned as an army surgeon in Belle Isle and Portugal. He acquired surgical skills and experienced on gunshot wounds and inflammation [11]. He began to collect materials on those issues which published posthumously in 1794 [15]. On his return to England in 1763, he began to build up his private practice. In 1767, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society [22]. He published the first part of his Treatise on the teeth in May 1771 [12, 19]. Two months later, he married Anne Home (1742–1821), a daughter of an old Scottish family [8]. In 1768, he was elected Surgeon to St. George’s Hospital and he was appointed as SurgeonExtraordinary to King George III in 1776. In 1786, he won the Copley Medal, the highest award of the Royal Society [24]. While meeting of the Board of Governors of St. George’s Hospital, he collapsed and died on 16 October 1793. There are some conflicts on the reason of his death. The autopsy demonstrated lesions in his aorta compatible with his self-induced syphilis [22]. Others argued that there was no autopsy evidence of syphilis but evidence only of advanced arteriosclerotic vascular disease [6, 10]. He was initially buried in a crypt of the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Field. His remains were transferred to Westminster Abbey in February 1859 [24].